Flag of My Devotion

stitching together the disparate parts of the self

⭐️ This letter is a ~4 minute read ⭐️

I am a person who has spent many a moment trying to decipher how my diverse interests and life practices all fit together.

I am a person who has fought in the undertow of what am I gonna be when I grow up, wondering how in god’s name will the disparate, manifold activities of the heart achieve homeostatic, puzzle-piecing togetherness. 

Understanding my work in the world has at times felt like surfing blindfolded, or like crawling around on hands and knees, searching in a dark room for the Mapquest directions printed out and stashed somewhere around here…

I used to feel really envious of the single pointed career oriented people among us who are so obviously built to do what they discovered at age 5 is their calling. The touring musician, the zoologist, the actor, the author, the arborist. 

For me, even the things I’ve loved since I was 5 left me with a feeling that there was more to discover in other arenas of life, and to engage with a single pointed dedication to the one holy craft to rule them all would be a kind of death. to the other rambunctious curiosities within me.

Shout out to all my Manifesting Generators and human design nerds in the house.

Shout out to all my ADHD baddies with a penchant for the elegantly erratic left turns on the career path.

Like so many of us, I’ve been scrapping the plan of legibility and homogeneity of everything fitting neatly into the THIS IS WHAT I DO FOR WORK handbag for some time now.

These days, I have the breathing room in my art making practice to let all the interests spill out heftily and bodaciously from all sides of the container. 

Beyond my previous understanding of what an interdisciplinary artist is, its like I now get to say:

I want all of you, my inner creative minions, in the same room at the same time talking feverishly all at once. I want you to spill and overlap and surf together, every aspect informing the other simultaneously.

This month I’ve been making a series of patchwork panels for Blue Heron Nature Preserve in Atlanta. This project has spiritedly galvanized the services of my dancing self, my ritual-conjuring self, my painterly self, and of course my stitch witch self.

It’s given me a space to make something big, take risks, and ask how all of my creative practices can be braided together at once.

I was originally asked if I wanted to make a public performance for the Preserve’s outdoor exhibition. Which makes sense, this is mostly what I am known to produce in my community. Except that it didn’t feel exciting to me at all. 

I do not want to frolic in the woods for public consumption.

BUT I DO WANT TO FROLIC IN THE WOODS-- 

covertly, all by myself. 

It's had me asking what gets to be considered a dance. And who is the dance for? 

I remember when I first started cultivating a solo dance practice in a studio years ago, (shout out to WORK ROOM, I still miss you everyday) I used to wonder the phrase ‘if a dancer falls alone in the woods and no one is there to see it is it still a dance?’ That was a time of bewilderment by the hours spent alone in a studio. So enmeshed was I in the imperative of the audience-performer relationship that I struggled to dig into the life-giving research of ‘this dance is just for me.’

Now, at the Preserve, I know that if a dancer moves alone in the woods, for the dirt, the deer, and the trees, then it is a dance. It is a sensuous and ecstatic offering to a place. It is an efforting towards being in right relationship to the land. A land towards which we as a civilization have mostly made daily choices of betrayal.

I know I can move my body as a way to bear witness to the magic and majesty of this land, so as to say ‘I have time for you, I am with you.’

With a public audience there’s interference. Static on the line. The purpose of the dance becomes muddy, and it’s unclear who this dance is for.

So a few times throughout the month, I showed up to the Preserve to ask what else can the dance be? What gets created when I listen with all three trillion cells to the rhythms and currents my ears cannot hear?

The moving, dancing body as an antennae, snagging frequencies of a place that get translated as improvised movement.

Then I wanted to know how my drawing practice could fit into this listening-witnessing-dancing experience.

So I brought big sheets as canvas, and charcoal and acrylic paint as drawing materials. I watered down the paint with river water, I used only sticks and found flora as drawing tools. 

I set out to trace the land and trace the dance with full-body gestural mark making.

The lines become the dance.  The lines become the echo and artifact of what transpired here.

I dragged sheets through the river, drawing with mud and silt, slopping wet sheets up on fallen trees and tracing the landforms. 

The dancing, breathing body as cartographer, a new kind of map emerges. 

I let them dry in the sun, and then cut them up. The rupture of ripping fabric becomes the dance.

If a map is disfigured alone in the woods, can you still find where you’re at?

Three patchwork panels were raised as flags, with big hearty support from my sweetheart Gavin and our friend Shawn.

Three gauzy sentinels, bearing witness to the land. Protecting and offering up their breezy dance to the critters and currents of this place.

Flag of my Devotion 1, 2 and 3.

One flag, three expressions. 

Devoted to my body the listener, the mark-maker, the improviser. Devoted to the land beyond location, nationhood or named territory.

Devoted to risk-taking in order to taste and experience all the diverse aspects of myself.

Devoted to the totality of expression. 

I want art that feels like sitting down at the Ouija board.

I want art that is ritual and ceremony, and the more I bring all of myself to the making, the more I get out of the way for a higher intelligence to move through me. 

There’s so much about our cultural conditioning that stipulates we niche ourselves down. That we choose one lane of self expression, self-actualization, and WORK. What if we get to slosh around in the river of all our interests and desires, listening for the complexity of currents, and trusting there is a wildly unique way they all get to dance together? 

We are making up the dance.

The dance gets to be whatever the hell we want!

Let the winds of your freaking fancy blow through you and blow your skirt all the way up. 💙

Big thanks to photo wizard Jamie Hopper for bearing witness to this duet with the land. 

✴ what else ✴

Our first cohort of Grief Threads wrapped up on Easter, which was also Passover, which was also Ramadan. Truly a high holy portal time! 

It was a magical ending to a five-week process of our own resurrection.  Turning over the compost of our grieving and seeing how it has changed us. Turns out this class has nothing and everything to do with sewing. Turns out this class is mostly a space to be exactly who you are, do whatever you want, and experience the tender humanity of one another.

We're starting back up with our next cohort of brave and incredible grief-tenders in May. Stay tuned for details, or sign up HERE to be on the waitlist. 

❤️ Melissa

photos: Jamie Hopper